But when AVFM’s recently appointed News Director Ty Henry wrote a post arguing that Cosby “should receive no safe harbor in the MHRM [Men’s Huan Rights Movement],” well, the powers that be told him to take a hike, rejecting his post and ultimately firing him from AVFM.

The only reason I know about any of this is that AVFM’s suspended-on-Twitter “social media director” Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield agreed to post it on her blog instead, explaining that

This article caused some controversy in the AVfM pool, with some strongly feeling it should be run and some strongly feeling it shouldn’t. In the interests of making sure no one feels their voice is quashed, I offered to run the controversial piece. I don’t necessarily agree with Ty Henry, the author, but since I have different editorial standards (some might say none) than AVfM, I’m running the piece to allow people to satisfy their curiosity.

So what exactly were the heretical thoughts that apparently got Henry’s piece banished from AVFM?

Well, for one thing, like most sensible people, Henry thinks Cosby is almost certainly guilty:

Considering his settlement in 2006, and recent disclosures, it’s pretty clear Bill Cosby likely violated the foregoing sovereignty of at least two women, the evidence his very own tongue. He’s also likely guilty of assaulting at least some of the women who have come forward, both in recent years, and going back to the 70s. Based on the totality of circumstances, to believe otherwise is to make his innocence an article of faith.

But perhaps even more galling for the AVFMistas, Henry bluntly points out the hypocrisy of those MRAs who loudly declare “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” every time a man is accused of rape, while offering no similar “due process” to women accusing men of rape.

The due process clause protects Cosby from the randomness of mob-justice fueled prosecution, as it should. I’m not here to advocate for ad-hoc suspension of the Criminal Rules of Evidence or Statutes of Limitations. It does not, however, shield him or his acts from the ruthless glare of critical inquiry.

A little pretentiously put, but possibly the most sensible thing I’ve ever heard an MRA say.

Henry continues, noting one case (of many) in which AVFMers have been happy to forget about that whole “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” thing:

[C]onsider this; Emma Sulkowicz has not been charged with, nor sued for, false accusations. So why do these pages label her such, including our venerable CEO? Reasonable inferences based on statements, facts and evidence in the public square, that’s why.

Well, I didn’t say that everything Henry had to say was perfect.

After detailing some of the many reasons we have to believe that Cosby is indeed guilty, Henry argues that even though Cosby will almost certainly not spend even a day in prison, he fully deserves having his reputation wrecked in the court of public opinion.

Bill Cosby is unlikely to serve jail time for his transgressions. Such is the nature of due process, as statutes of limitations have run, and with forensic evidence having long since dissolved, most of these cases would be dismissed at trial anyway. That should have no bearing, however, on his legacy henceforth.

His hypocrisy and repugnant violations of the rights of women is now the dominant feature of that legacy, and should these women secure some financial redress , that is more than he deserves for both his behavior and his casual, yet malignant, insouciance in the face of their years of suffering. For that, he should receive no safe harbor in the MHRM.

In a remarkable postscript to his post, Henry notes that he actually sort-of knew one of Cosby’s accusers, Andrea Constand, from her college basketball days, and that this makes him even more sure that she is telling the truth.

I’m on the record now saying her courage in coming forward, unsealing painful memories to help others clear their besmirched names, makes me even prouder to be an Arizona Wildcat. I stand with Andrea, even if I must stand alone on these pages.

And that’s the news AVFM deems unfit to print … though not if you believe Paul Elam, Henry’s ex-boss at AVFM.In the comments on JudgyBitch’s blog, Elam claims Henry’s published post is different from the one he tried to get published at AVFM.

His original piece included the term “Bill Cosby is a serial rapist,..” a flat declaration of guilt. That was the precise reason why the piece was rejected. He was also offered the opportunity to retool the piece, sans the declaration of guilt, which we would have been more likely to run.

Given Elam’s not-exactly stellar track record with the truth, I’m not sure I buy any of this. Even if Henry’s original post did contain the phrase “Bill Cosby is a serial rapist,” AVFM makes “flat declarations of guilt” and all sorts of categorical (and categorically false) statements about feminists all the time; I’ve lost track of how often they’ve libelled me. So the idea that Elam was protecting AVFM’s editorial integrity is laughable at best; AVFM has no editorial integrity.We’ll just have to see how this develops, won’t we?

Who will be the next to jump (or get shoved) off the bad ship A Voice for Men?

Aurini is naturally furious and a large Twitter thread started here: https://twitter.com/Aurini/status/627411673662386176 – about who’s been lying or who’s a journalist or some bollocks. Meanwhile, repellent bastard-in-chief Matt Forney made a sarcastic primary-school-bullying level tweet towards the event which I’m not going to link to, and has since been spending his time on Twitter arguing with other conservatives about who’s the biggest cuck (there might have been a slight spelling error).

It seems like just like at AVFM, the friction from these people’s huge egos scraping against each other might be coming back to bite them and drive them away from each other – it seems like a competition to see who can become the biggest shitelord ever, with any hint of empathy or niceness being jumped on as impure and its owner being kicked out of the treehouse.

@sn0rkmaiden – I know it was harder, but as a Brit, that makes it even more shocking that he would be able to get his hands on the weapons. Especially worrying because I have friends currently studying in Newcastle.
The Yorkshire Evening post yesterday also gave news of a man in Bradford who had bought ricin on the dark web. And then claimed he was just “curious” about it after watching Breaking Bad! (Nobody believed him).

I guess I should feel safe, because both these would-be murderers were caught before they could do any real harm, but it’s still extremely unsettling.

@davidknewton – That update contains more than twice the recommended daily dose of Schadenfreude, and now I can’t stop chuckling to myself. It’s a thing of beauty.

9 people. Hah! That is sad. I’m an introvert with a limited social circle and not much of an online presence. If I made a documentary I’m certain I could get more than nine people to come. I would feel bad for them but I’m just not that nice.

It’s so revealing how these “tireless warriors against the tide of ‘false accusations'” literally can’t imagine a situation where an accusation to be true and will fight to the death against anyone who suggests that maybe a rape survivor is telling the truth.

They couldn’t be broadcasting how much they are rapists trying to obfuscate the deeds of their past if they strung it up in LEDs and stapled it to their forehead.

It works into my theory that more conservatively-minded folk are good at sympathy but bad at empathy. Ty knows the victim in this case and his personal relationship with her makes it hard for him to just write her off.

I think this is super common, especially when someone has an axis of privilege on the subject. After all, it’s really easy not to be aware of a life experience you don’t have and to ignore its very existence if you are in the dominant group and all of culture is reinforcing that your life experiences are the default and the norm and the only things that matter and that you’re inherently better than the other who’s trying to make you think and is being all rude by not sticking to their tiny box.

It actually takes a considerable amount of work and humility to check that privilege and empathize with a foreign situation and it often requires a lot of self-awareness, curiosity, and genuine desire to learn and do right even if it means losing that sense of specialness.

So for a lot of people, it’s a lot easier to just default and check out, because there’s rarely a social punishment for doing so unless you know the people being affected personally.

…

There’s also an argument to be made about those who find conservative ideology appealing and imagination. I think if one really struggles with imagination, it becomes easier to just assume that everyone’s like you. So, if you’re caring and overly trusting, it becomes easy to imagine that everyone is good inside even when they are abusing you.

But if you’re small-minded, petty, and prone to punishing the smallest slight, then the world is filled with awful, greedy, horrible people who deserve whatever you can throw at them.

I think this is part of the reason so many right-wing or hate group articles about the other so often look like mirrors of the writers, because in their imagination, of course the inferior hated other would be just like them but somehow worse, because they literally can’t imagine that people aren’t always just looking for whatever angle will allow them to maintain power and control.

The question was not whether it was going tio be awful. We’re talking about people who have no clue about how to make a documentary. The question was always whether it was going to be hilarious awful or tedious awful.

Wait, the official Sarkeesian Effect website used lorem ipsum for the bios of everyone who appeared in it? And misspelled Aurini’s name? Could they put any less effort and professionalism into this project?

Funny story. I looked up the odds of encountering a shiny (one in eight thousand something) and my first thought was: ok, so if I start the Kyogre battle 9000 times, statistically I should get a shiny Kyogre. After doing it about 1000 times I realized it was a lot more work than I thought. Finally I decided to give it 10 more tries, and on the 7th or 8th try I got the purple one. And that’s the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. :p

Wait, the official Sarkeesian Effect website used lorem ipsum for the bios of everyone who appeared in it? And misspelled Aurini’s name? Could they put any less effort and professionalism into this project?

And not even lorem ipsum, but just a paragraph copy/pasted from wikipedia or something explaining what lorem ipsum is! It’s not even actual dummy text. Patreon dollars well spent!

Robjec | August 1, 2015 at 4:13 am
@Paradoxical Intention
off topic but I wanted to say I saw your comments on an article about how gg treats all of video game journalism as one being but refuses to take responsibility for its members but I didn’t have a word press so I couldn’t.

Coo. Thanks for letting me know, but I’m a wee bit confused?

“I didn’t have a word press so I couldn’t…” what?

I think your comment got a little cut out of the middle there. 😕

But thanks for saying so! It was my first head-poke outside of this place, really.

@AltoFronto
I actually know someone who tried to make ricen after watching breaking bad just cuz it was in the show and almost poisoned himself and ended up under fbi survalence for a while so it is a thing.

@pi
oh the site needed a word press to respond and I didn’t have one so I didn’t lol.

Whoops, fell asleep after posting. ^^; Just a random Marill. Honestly, I have so many 5/6-IV shinies that a Marill with crap stats is worth nothing to me. I don’t mean that as a brag, just saying my point was “Even that‘s more interesting to people than this shitfest.” =P

(… Okay, while we’re on the topic, one brag: I spent a few days resetting for a shiny Cobalion with perfect IVs, decided to try him out by catching the in-game Uxie, and she was also shiny with perfect IVs. WUT.)

@Cerberus
You make some excellent points. I would add that it’s also hard, at least some of the time, for even open-minded, politically progressive people with an imagination to know that not everyone is like them. Or to imagine an alternative reality. For example, how many first-time new parents really understand how much work a baby will be? And how many people understand that they, like everyone else (who’s lucky), will grow old?

Nice! But I’m confused about what you mean by perfect IVs. I thought IVs were decided on a 1-31 scale for attack/defence/spec attack/speed, so that would be a 1/923521 (pretty much one in a million) chance right there, times whatever the odds are for perfect spec defence and HP. Could anyone really be that lucky? :p But I’m not an expert when it comes to pokémon behind-the-scenes numbers, and I suck at math. I was just curious what you meant by perfect IVs.

Perfect as in perfect. =3 Either five (if one isn’t used, namely a physical attacker’s Special Attack and vice versa) or six (if they’re all used) 31s, or sometimes 30s and 31s if I’m using a particular Hidden Power type. Most were bred, which makes getting perfect IVs absolutely trivial, some were RNG’d and that Uxie was pure 1/numbers dumb luck.

Wow. So 5 IVs of 31, times the odds of shiny, would come out to 1 in 234587263294 to encounter a shiny Uxie with those IVs. I don’t even know how to pronounce that number. I guess it could be rounded to 1 shot in 235 billion? That’s pretty amazing. Can you pick my lottery numbers for me? :p

But the statement “Bill Cosby is a serial rapist” is true. Only a misogynist would argue that all of those women are lying about what he did to them. AVFM should just be honest and admit that they don’t believe what Cosby did to those women constituted rape, like the good rape apologists they are.

Infected by basic decency from within! Gargh! Please please please can “Mad Madam Elam” become an actual meme thing – I can picture him doing the little song and dance as we speak, and his reliance on blindly oppositional politics makes him a dead ringer (plus he’d hate to be reincarnated in brainspace as sprightly old woman.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.